Andrew Luck’s retirement showed just how twisted fans can be

Andrew Luck was the perfect football prospect. He was sharp, and he didn’t make mistakes. He was big, and he moved, and he threw an incredible deep ball. He said what he should say, and his hat always faced an appropriate direction. He was relentlessly optimistic and affable, and stood for innocuous things he articulated in ways that felt thoughtful, earnest, and unworn.

When he was laying waste to college football throughout his last two seasons at Stanford, he even made tanking in the NFL seem like a good idea. I’ve never seen anything like Suck for Luck. He may be the most coveted quarterback to ever play.

The hype bore out. On the field, he was consistent and good. You felt comfortable watching him. He could be a weapon, but more importantly he was a balm. If he were a driver on a long road trip, you’d have felt comfortable falling asleep in the passenger seat knowing he would get you to your destination as efficiently and safely as possible. The Colts only felt peace when he was on the field during his seven years in the league, going 53-33 when he played and 10-16 when he didn’t.

It’s hard to think of a game or moment that defined Luck’s career, of the particular triumph or collapse that feels so emblematic of other quarterbacks. His best game was perhaps a 28-point comeback win over the Chiefs in which Luck threw for 443 yards and four touchdowns (and three interceptions, but who cares) during the 2014 postseason. That was before Luck came to be known by his knee-capped greatness. But even after appearing in only seven games in 2015, his six-year, $140 million extension in 2016 felt just.

Luck was steady and can’t-miss even if he didn’t excite. He was the quarterback who couldn’t possibly fail you, which is why it hurt Colts fans so bad when he retired and kinda did fail them. In a twisted sense. They had invested emotionally invested themselves in Luck to an extreme level befitting a perfect football prospect and the hope that inspires.

That’s why some people booed a dear, sweet man on Saturday.

In his impromptu retirement press conference, Luck admitted the booing “hurt.” In his mind, retiring was in line with every other decision he’s made in football, going back to college when he forewent the NFL Draft for a year to stay at Stanford and finish his degree in architectural design. He wasn’t meant to be a football superweapon. He had the mindset and skill to perform at the highest level of competency. Luck played like a man who had trial-tested every throw in every scenario. The lizard-brain, win-or-die competitiveness that is instinctive in so many NFL players, and especially the best quarterbacks, never seemed rooted in him. Luck was so empathetic and so incapable of a grudge that he’d compliment defenders who sacked him.

Luck told us who he was all along. Most of all, he was immensely bright and smart and self-assured. Someone who would and could wisely give up millions in guaranteed money instead of continue in a profession that had “taken my joy away,” as he put during his final press conference. What a stunning turn of phrase that was, one that ought to resonate throughout NFL history.

Luck was an ironman athlete. He gritted through the 2015 season on a bum shoulder far longer than he should have. Only a lacerated kidney and urine in his blood — an affliction that typically occurs as the result of a car crash — put him on the sideline for good that season. He played in offenses under Chuck Pagano that favored slow-developing deep-ball plays behind horrid offensive lines and yet nothing dampened his spirit. He did his job for as long as it was his job. He knew as well as anyone can what was needed to play the position properly. And when he no longer could, he stopped.

And that’s ostensibly what fans should want him to do, instead of watching him suffer through a deteriorating relationship as they hold on too tightly to the idea that athletes are privileged. Luck is privileged in the sense that he’s well-off and well prepared for life after football. Not everyone is, and those who aren’t so uniquely situated often hold onto the sport long past their effectiveness in spite of their bodies’ best interests, and to the point when fans then, ironically, resent them for not retiring soon enough.

The dissonance between how fans took the news compared to athletes showed just how far removed many fans are from the reality of the sport. If Luck had been a $1 million cornerback instead of a $140 million quarterback, they would have had a lot more sympathy. Implicit is that the $1 million athlete knows the grind better than the $100 million athlete, and that money is the biggest factor in determining what is and isn’t “worth it.” To criticize Luck is to suggest he doesn’t have a right to feel stress and anxiety and sadness, or worse, that for the money he should be incapable of those emotions.

Booing Luck suggests the money he made was a gift, not something he earned, and thus not something he should be free to do with as he pleases. It’s an understanding of athletes as different calibers of autonomous machines, and it’s among the worst perversions of fandom.

The fact that fans booed someone as dedicated and truly un-unlikeable as Luck should be the first and last thing that needs to be said when athletes explain why their relationship with the public feels so begrudging at times. It’s another example of why we should listen to players much more than we do, whether about the tolls of the sport or the hundreds of other issues for which they’ve been increasingly excoriated in the last few years.

Football is a sport on shaky legs, represented foremost by the domineering and life force-sucking organizations of the NFL and NCAA. If this sport doesn’t feel very fun at times as a fan, then imagine what it must be like to play it.

Just think: This is the sport that even made Andrew Luck feel sad.